In honor of the ten year anniversary of the Mozilla project, home.mcom.com, the Internet Web Site of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, is now back online.

It took some doing. There is comedy.

First, the fun stuff:

Until now, home.mcom.com and all URLs under it just redirected to netscape.com, then redirected a dozen more times before taking you to some AOL portal page. The old URLs that were baked into the toolbar buttons of the original web browsers didn't work any more. But now, if you fire up a copy of Mosaic Netscape 0.9, and click on the various toolbar buttons, they will work again! For example, in the old browsers, when you clicked on the "What's New" toolbar button, it went here.

mosaic.mcom.com is now a snapshot of that web site from July 1994. That's from just after the company was announced, but before the first browser beta was released. I think that by Oct 1994, both mosaic.mcom.com and www.mcom.com were redirects to home.mcom.com, but I can't remember any more.

In order to make these web sites work in the old browsers, it was necessary to host them specially. In this modern world, a single server will typically host multiple web sites from a single IP address. This works because modern web browsers send a "Host" header saying which site they're actually looking for. Old web browsers didn't do that: if you wanted to host a dozen sites on a single server, that server had to have a dozen IP addresses, one for each site. So these sites have dedicated addresses!

The web server also had to be configured to not send a "charset" parameter on the "Content-Type" header, because the old browsers didn't know what to make of that.

Trivia Question #2: Do you remember the behavioral difference the browsers exhibited when they were talking to a Netscape web server?

Trivia Question #3: When was the <HYPE> tag implemented, and what was its origin?

I had originally planned on re-hosting these web sites on an SGI Indy running Mosaic Netsite Commerce Server, just for maximal comedic value... and to see how long it took before someone Øwned it, since there must be someone out there who still remembers how to launch an assault on Irix 5.3. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible for political reasons explained below.

Trivia Answers:

home1.mcom.com through home32.mcom.com exist because the early browsers did client-side load-balancing: the browser itself had a special case where if it was loading "home.mcom.com" it would actually pick a random number from 1 to 32 and instead load "homeN.mcom.com"! Those were physically different servers in the Netscape data center.

When loading pages from a Netscape server, the caption next to the URL field in the browser would change from "Location" to "Netsite".

Not telling.

Enough about all that, I want to run some old browsers!

My personal collection of old Netscape browsers is here: home.mcom.com/archives/. It's not complete, but it's all that I could find. (It is missing some key releases, such as Netscape 0.4 for Irix, which was the first release to ever leave the building; and the "non-exportable"-crypto versions of almost all of them.)

Since pulling all those files out is kind of a pain, I've put together a tarball: netscape-linux-libs.tar.gz. Unpack it in your root directory. It shouldn't conflict with anything modern. I've tested that on Red Hat 9 and Ubuntu 7.10.

Mac users: If you're using a modern Mac, you need to use an emulator.

Download
BasiliskII
and BasiliskIIGUI
from
Emaculation.
Note: there are apparently a number of projects that call themselves "BasiliskII 1.0", but the one linked here seems to be the only one that actually works.

Launch the "netscape1_0.sea" self-extracting archive. And you're in business!

Alternately! Instead of un-StuffIt-ing each browser, you can just download this System 7 disk image that I made: netscape-mac.img.zip (59MB) which contains each of the unpacked Mac executables from 0.9 through 4.04.

Note that if you want to run 0.9, you'll have to set your (real) system clock back to 1994 to get around the time-bomb. (0.93 and later don't have a time bomb.)

Once you've got those old browsers running, you'll find that they're working fine with the mcom.com web sites, but they fail on just about every other web site in the world (for the "Host" header reason I described above).

I have a fix for that!

I wrote a small proxy server that bidirectionally translates the HTTP/1.0 protocol spoken by old web browsers to the HTTP/1.1 protocol spoken on the modern web. Download and run http10proxy.pl. (You may need to install the Net::Server::Fork Perl module first.) Then, go into the preferences on your ancient browser and set "HTTP Proxy" to localhost, port 8228. This will adjust outgoing Host headers as well as incoming Content-Type headers.

What Was That About Politics?

When I heard that AOL was shutting down their Netscape division for good, I mailed a contact there and asked if they'd transfer the mcom.com domain to me, so that I could resurrect these web sites to make the old browsers work right.

My contact asked around, and much to my surprise, the answer was yes! Wheels were put in motion, AOL's operations folks removed their dependencies on those domains (no idea what those were!) and the domains were about to be transfered... when...

AOL Chief IP Counsel and Time Warner blocked it.

Why?

Because their lawyers determined that, because mcom.com is ten years old and four letters long, they could make several hundred thousand dollars by simply putting it on the market and selling it to a spammer!

And so they began the process of doing exactly that.

Fortunately, my contact (who prefers to remain anonymous) talked them out of this, pointing out that it would be perhaps not the best PR move. But still, they wouldn't transfer it to me. AOL still owns the domains. However, they were willing to host the old Netscape content there, at least for now.

So, thank you to my anonymous contact for all the help! And thank you to AOL for hosting these historic web pages. And for not (yet?) selling the domain to a spammer.

FYI, the search page (at "http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/search_docs/index.html") is not working properly. The server is not configured so that the query CGI is a CGIExec (or however that works those days), so I just get the Perl back.

You know what's even funnier? Moving the mountain of getting AOL to resurrect mcom.com was one zillion times easier than moving the mountain of, "Hey Brendan/Mitchell/Harvey, I have a bunch of old browsers, please put them on http://ftp.mozilla.org." After a month, I was still getting the "oh gosh I don't know" runaround about that as of yesterday, so I'm done trying. If you guys want it, you know where to find it.

Netscape 1.22 does run:http://www.rgo.gweep.net/~ratinox/GFX/Netscape.jpgI'm still figuring out the networking. It's supposed to use the slirp PPP driver but I haven't figured out how to make it talk. I haven't used BasiliskII in several years so it's all new to me again. Back later, hopefully with some results.

I don't suppose you have any companion builds of Netscape's Commerce server? It'd be worth buying an old SGI from ebay to play with ye olde SSL. Hell, for a real nostalgia trip, little could beat digging up some fortezza gear too.

If anyone can possibly tell me how to get IE5-for-Unix installed under Solaris 10, I'd be much appreciative. (Hey, it would be at least as comedic as what Jamie did here!) The old installer binary is still archived online, but doesn't run.

I got Netscape .094B2 to work in Mac OS 8.6 running in SheepShaver on a MacBook Pro. Wow, what a blast from the past! It even s l o w l y loads jpegs pass by pass - an effect I've not seen in a long time! Also used the view source a bit - web pages sure were simple back then.

Setting up SheepShaver is its own can of worms. If you need information there reply and I'll do my best based on my memory of what I did.

the 0.4 win16 browser worked with no trouble, but even going to http://home.mcom.com/ it keeps asking me to configure a viewer for "text/html;charset=iso-8859-1"I though you said that was changed on the server...

I mirrored this years ago after coming across the files on one of the international GNN mirror sites. In those halcyon days (I was the GNN technical editor/webmaster), we solved the content distribution problem by finding volunteer sites around the world to host GNN content. The main site was gnn.com; the only other one I remember was nearnet.gnn.com.

Did Mosaic or NSCP sell the browser in a box in stores? Because I have this memory of going with my dad to buy a web browser in a box. I do not remember when this was. It might have been Prodigy (teh awesom!).

Whatever we bought that day, I'm sure I don't still have, which I find sad.

Yes, there were Netscape retail boxes -- believe it or not, we actually made money doing that. Spry also had (Windows-only, I think?) retail boxes of their NCSA Mosaic descendant (bundled with a TCP stack, which didn't come with the OS back then). I can't remember if Spyglass also had retail boxes of their NCSA descendant, or if they only did license bundles.

(For those of you unclear on the history: NCSA Mosaic was written by a bunch of people who went on to found Netscape. The original code-name-Mozilla browser (that is, "Mosaic Netscape") was written from scratch by a team including most of the NCSA Mosaic developers. Meanwhile, NCSA licensed the original Mosaic source to a few other companies, including Spry, Spyglass, and Microsoft, who forked it and developed their own versions. Early versions of Internet Explorer shared code with NCSA Mosaic (lots, at first). Netscape never did. However, NCSA sued Mosaic Communications Corp. over the word "Mosaic", and we settled with them, changing from a company called "Mosaic" with a product called "Netscape" to a company called "Netscape" with a product called "Navigator". Which we had always called "Mozilla" internally. Clear now?)

Spry had two retail box products, Internet in a Box, which was the consumer version, and Internet Office, which was a corporate suite including a mail program, gopher, and some other largely useless apps. They were both Windows-only.

I worked on what was to become the Mac version of Internet Office, but by early 1996, the business model moved away from getting people to pay for the browser to the AOL spray-and-pray method of mailing out ten million discs at a time. Also, MS had much more generous redistribution terms for IE by that point ("Absolutely free, if you help us assimilate") so the project went from a Spry-ized version of Spyglass to a bundle of IE with Spry/Compuserve's account generation crap.

I think I still have the Sprynet CD somewhere. I hid an easter egg in the online help, since they wouldn't let us hide one in the code.

I am a youngin' (relatively speaking) who completely "missed out" on the Internet/WWW of the 90's (okay, "didn't have access" is more accurate :P), and I do realize this post comes out of nowhere being several months down the line, but I suppose I got a good couple of chuckles out of it.

So I was using the CS computers at RIT as a freshman; these systems ran a somewhat under-maintained image (probably more up-to-date now, seeing as that was a short-yet-long two years ago). They also came equipped with a broken, not-the-latest-version copy of Mosaic, as any Solaris image with "hasn't been completely looked over in more than a decade" syndrome might be bound to have. My curiosity (and freshman boredom) was sufficiently piqued, so I opened up the Mosaic source, tweaked it to compile, and got it running. "Working" would be the wrong word there; Mosaic, apparently, can't properly browse most sites running on modern servers, even with old-school HTML files and old-school image formats and such, and yall'd probably know why about ten times better than I do - I tinker with old code for giggles, I don't go digging into the history of protocols. Then came the true test: if I can't browse most "real" sites, what can I?

So for fun and profit, I typed in all the "about:" addresses I could come up with without cheating and looking at the source. I stopped at "about:mozilla" because it had the witty retort I'd been hoping it'd spit at me. And now you know. As if you didn't before, but eh. Every day is "browse like a caveman" day when I feel like it |-'

For those who would rather not waste the time putting it into practice and would rather spend it looking through theory instead, the offending code is archived here.

Thanks a lot for posting this. I came into the scene a bit late (mid-1995) but still remember the early days fondly.

It's a shame about mcom.com; I'm actually surprised AOL cares so much about a hundred grand or so that they might be able to sell the domain for... that's like an average person caring about twelve cents; it's really nothing to them.

I hope you can keep this up for a while. One of the downsides about our culture moving to the Internet is the fact that history can be lost to the ages if it's not meticulously kept. There are no physical archives of web pages that might sit for decades in someone's basement to be rediscovered later, so people like you are all we have.

I remember quite clearly downloading NCSA Mosaic in the fall of 1993 while working at UMaine, which was quite impressive on a Mac Quadra and the then-massive 21" color Radius monitor.

I also remember setting up the first web server on campus, using a SPARCstation 2 and NCSA HTTPD, in '93, and having all sorts of other departments wanting help and hosting space to make their own "home pages".

I ended up going to Umaine for personal reasons, but UIUC had been my original choice. Oddly enough, I had visited the campus with some friends from Illinois, and by chance had crashed for a night at Rob McCool's apartment (he was not there). A friend later ended up working at NCSA, with an office across the hall from Marc...

I tried out a really old Netscape on Linux a couple years ago. I opted for running the Windows version under WINE, which I figured would be easier and more reliable than an old Linux version. It worked OK, but the home page didn't work anymore; plus, as far as ancient browsers are concerned, you can't beat NCSA Mosaic (if it weren't so old and buggy and if it had SSL support, that would be my main browser; I just love the UI and features).

Apache only barely existed in 1994; it was a set of patches to NCSA httpd (which was written by Rob McCool, who also wrote the Netscape server.) Our server scaled a lot better, and I believe it was the only server that did crypto for quite some time.

I didn't work on the server project, so I hardly remember any of this.

I have a couple NeXTstations in storage. I one tried to use WorldWideWeb a few years ago, but it barfs upon start-up due to being unable to locate now non-existent CERN URLs. Should be workaround-able with some /etc/hosts hacking but I never got around to that...

Thanks for the posting and the effort with AOL :) I found that Mosaic/Netscape site in around way while trying to run old versions of Netscape from here: http://browsers.evolt.org/ (this one I found accidentally).